Content theft is one of the most frustrating problems we’ve had to deal with over the years on WPBeginner.
Stolen content can confuse your readers, hurt your search rankings, and devalue the hard work you’ve put into creating it. But here’s the good news: you don’t need to be a legal expert or tech genius to deal with it effectively.
In this article, we will show you how you can find and remove stolen content in WordPress.
Quick answer: In a hurry? Here’s the fastest way to handle it.
- Paste a unique sentence from your post into Google in quotation marks to find whether it’s copied.
- Send a DMCA notice to the site that copied your content and its web host.
- File Google’s DMCA form at reportcontent.google.com to get the copy delisted from search.
Here are some of the most effective ways to find and deal with stolen content in WordPress. You can use the links below to jump to a specific method:
1. Set Up Automatic Content Theft Notifications
Sometimes, your loyal visitors will alert you that your content has been stolen or they saw it somewhere else on the web.
Luckily, you don’t have to wait for a helpful reader to notify you.
Google Alerts is a handy tool often used for keeping track of brand mentions online. By setting it up, you can receive email notifications whenever your website is mentioned on the internet. This feature can also alert you if your content is being used without your permission.
To get started, go to Google Alerts. Enter your website’s name, URL, or a unique section of your article. For instance, if you use the same call to action at the end of each blog post, you can receive alerts anytime this phrase appears on other sites.
Next, choose ‘Sources’ from the menu, select ‘Blogs’ and ‘Web,’ and hit ‘Create Alert.’
Now, you’ll get an email whenever your content pops up on the web or when your site is mentioned elsewhere online.
If you’d rather not rely on keyword alerts, Copysentry is Copyscape’s dedicated content monitoring service. It automatically scans the web for copies of your content and emails you the moment it finds a match. It’s a solid option for monitoring content theft rather than general brand mentions.
2. Manually Search for Stolen Content
If you’d rather search for stolen content yourself, Google makes it easy to check for exact copies.
Copy a unique sentence from your post, ideally one that isn’t a generic phrase, and paste it into Google search wrapped in quotation marks. This forces Google to show only exact matches, which makes stolen copies easy to spot in the results.
Copyscape is another handy tool for checking plagiarism, which helps you find out if your content has been published elsewhere on the web.
Just head over to Copyscape and enter your website URL. You can also enter a specific post or page URL to check if your blog post or page has been copied. The free version displays the top 10 results, which is often plenty for small WordPress blogs.
You can also use Google Images to find copies of your visuals. Upload your images to Google Images and use the camera icon to run a reverse image search, or try Google Lens. Either way, you can see where else your image appears online.
3. Contact the Offending Host or Registrar
So, you’ve discovered your content has been stolen. What should you do next?
Before filing anything formal, it’s worth reaching out to the site owner directly if you can find their contact info. This costs nothing, and plenty of people who republish content without asking will simply take it down once you point out the issue.
If that doesn’t work, or you can’t find a way to reach them, you can file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint against the offending site.
This legal notice requests the removal of copyrighted material that is being used without permission.
If the copied content appears on a spammy site or one that automatically scrapes your RSS feed, finding the right contact information can be tricky. But don’t worry, you can use the IsItWP lookup tool to identify where the domain and site are hosted.
Enter the website URL where you’ve found your stolen content and click ‘Analyze Website’.
This tool will reveal details like the web hosting company and registrar.
You’ll find the host and registrar information, even if the site isn’t using WordPress. Reach out to them directly to request content removal. Since content theft is illegal, most web hosts will take action when you report copyright infringement.
Here’s a DMCA notice template you can copy, customize, and send to the site owner or web host:
[Your Name]
[Your Contact Information — email and/or mailing address]
I am the copyright owner of the original content located at:
[Original URL]
The following URL is using my copyrighted material without my permission:
[Infringing URL]
The copyrighted material being infringed is:
[Brief description of the original content]
I have a good faith belief that use of this material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in this notification is accurate, and that I am the copyright owner, or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
I request that you remove or disable access to the infringing material identified above.
[Your Signature]
[Date]
4. Submit a Takedown Notice to Google
If you want to remove stolen content from search results, you can report it directly to Google. Just be careful with this method, as you’ll need solid proof that your content was copied. Filing false reports could lead to problems with your account.
Start with Google’s Legal Help troubleshooter, which asks a few questions and routes you to the right removal form for your situation. For copyrighted content on a website, it leads to Google’s DMCA report form at reportcontent.google.com.
From here, simply fill in your contact information, then describe the copyrighted work and provide the URL where your original content lives, along with the URL of the infringing page.
The more detail you include, the better your chances of getting the infringing page removed from search results.
If you need additional evidence for your complaint, tools like the Wayback Machine can help. This tool captures snapshots of your site over time, allowing you to compare when you published your content against when the infringing site copied it.
Bing has an equivalent process. If the stolen content is showing up there too, you can submit a copyright removal request through Bing’s content removal form.
5. Use an All-in-One Scanner and Takedown Tool
You can use the DMCA Scan tool to find duplicate copies of your content across the web.
To get started, just enter your text or URL into the tool, and it will search the web for sites that have copied your content. Note that the results won’t always be stolen content. It may sometimes be infographics, backlinks, unlinked brand mentions, and more.
Once you have found a site that plagiarized or stole your content, you can start the takedown process using this same online tool. If you’d rather handle takedowns yourself, its DIY toolkit costs $10 per month. Alternatively, DMCA.com has a full-service takedown for $199, where its team handles the process for you.
6. Control How AI Crawlers Use Your Content
Now that we’ve covered how to remove stolen content, let’s look at how you can control AI crawlers and prevent unwanted scraping.
AI crawlers scan websites for different reasons, including training AI models, powering search results, and performing tasks on behalf of users. You don’t necessarily want to block all of them.
Blocking search crawlers can prevent your content from appearing in AI search results and citations. For example, OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot if you want your content to appear in ChatGPT search.
AI crawlers generally fall into three categories:
- Training crawlers like
GPTBotandCCBotcollect content for AI model training. - Search crawlers like
OAI-SearchBotcrawl pages so they can be included in AI search results. - Agent crawlers access pages on behalf of users to complete tasks.
For most sites, a good starting point is to block training crawlers while allowing search crawlers. This limits the use of your content for AI training while still giving AI search tools a chance to send visitors to your site.
You can do this by adding a few rules to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /How to Prevent Content Theft in the Future
Finding and removing stolen content will always be part of running a website, but a few habits can cut down how often it happens:
- Switch your RSS feed to show excerpts instead of full posts, so scrapers only get a summary. See our guide on preventing blog content scraping in WordPress.
- Disable text selection and copy/paste on your posts and pages, so casual scrapers can’t just highlight and copy your content. See our guide on preventing text selection and copy/paste in WordPress.
- Enable hotlink protection so other sites can’t display your images directly from your server. Our guide on preventing image theft in WordPress walks through how.
- Add a copyright notice and a terms of service page, so it’s clear your content isn’t free to republish. See our guide on adding a terms of service agreement in WordPress.
We hope this article helped you learn how to find and remove stolen content in WordPress. You may also want to see our guides on how to trademark and copyright your blog’s name & logo or our expert picks of the best WordPress content protection plugins.
Moinuddin Waheed
This is very serious and ethical concern.
Your hardwork gets utilised by someone else and even without you knowing about the issue.
thank you for bringing this article to fight against the content theft.
I think it is very necessary to keep updated oneself with automatic content theft notifications.
and use cooyscrap and other tools to regularly check for any misuse of the content.
This will help bring such offences to minimum.
This article is very very useful for theft protection.
Olaf
This article could be an eye-opener for many. Why? Because a lot of people neglect proper security for their web content, assuming no one is interested enough to steal it. The opposite is often true. And there are many ways to protect content, whether through watermarks, better-protected RSS, disabling the right-click function, and more. If this issue does need addressing, it’s great that there’s a guide like this, explaining everything step-by-step. It can lessen the frustration over stolen content by showing exactly how to defend against it—and, most importantly, that it’s possible to protect yourself.
David Lim
I don’t understand why it’s a good thing to brag about other people’s content as if it’s our own. It can certainly be the easier way, but in many cases it ends very badly.
Jiří Vaněk
I occasionally use SEMRUSH backlinks to find stolen images. It can perfectly find sites that steal your images using so-called hotlinking. I recommend trying this method once in a while.